Wayne To is our Chief Technology Officer. Mr. To brings over 30 years of experience in biopharmaceutical research and development across the academic, pharmaceutical and biotech settings. He joined Kodiak in 2010 as head of biochemistry and bioconjugates where he helped establish the early Kodiak ABC Platform and led internal and external technical design and manufacturing. In this role, Mr. To was responsible for developing the ABC platform from early concept to toxicology-enabling processes followed by technology transfer of clinical candidates into cGMP manufacturing at contract manufacturing organizations. More recently, Mr. To served as Vice President and Senior Scientific Fellow at Kodiak with primary responsibility to identify technical gaps across Kodiak’s product and pipeline development and to apply scientific leadership in collaboration with project and departmental owners. Mr. To led the effort to design new enhanced formulations for Kodiak’s ABC Platform medicines including tarcocimab (KSI-301) and KSI-501. Kodiak’s go-to-market formulations are educated from Kodiak’s BLA-facing commercial-scale manufacturing activities and BLA-facing clinical activities and are composed of a mixture of biopolymer-conjugated antibody and non-conjugated antibody, to create medicines that are commercially manufacturable, readily injectable via intravitreal injection, and in which by design clinical efficacy balances towards a 6-month predominant durability profile without compromising immediacy of effect. To this end, Mr. To also developed novel analytical systems and methods which, together with the enhanced formulations themselves, have resulted in multiple additional patent filings. More recently, Mr. To has played a leadership role in the evolution of Kodiak’s “ABCD” Platform in which we have expanded our early research pipeline of duets and triplets that embed diverse active pharmaceutical ingredients (“API”) including small molecules, proteins, peptides, macrocycles and oligonucleotides in the biopolymer backbone to enable high drug antibody ratio (“DAR”) medicines with targeted, multi-specific, tailored modulation of biological pathways for ophthalmic and systemic diseases.
Mr. To’s extensive biotech experience includes Onyx Pharmaceuticals, DNAX Research Institute (Acquired by Merck), Avidia (Acquired by Amgen), Amunix (Acquired by Sanofi), and Kodiak Sciences.
While at Avidia, Mr. To was the core manufacturing team lead responsible for establishing the platform technology and platform products and contributed to the development of the clinical candidate C326 from concept to First in Human in only eighteen months and contributed significantly to the acquisition of Avidia by Amgen for $450 million. Mr. To also played a core CMC role at Amunix Inc. to develop the CMC processes for the XTEN platform, which contributed to the development of XTEN products from concept to early technology transfer to external contract manufacturing organizations and which resulted in clinical candidate VRS-317 for Versartis Inc. and the company’s Initial Public Offering (“IPO”) in 2014.
Mr. To received his B.Sc (with honors) and then M.Phil in clinical immunology and medical sciences in the Chinese University of Hong Kong, followed by postgraduate training at the Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry at UCSF.